As the chaos continued into Thursday a collective decision was taken by the small foreign community to evacuate. The nearest border was at Hairaton, ninety miles to the north, where the Amu Darya river marks the southern edge of Uzbekistan. The UN hastily arranged a convoy.
Lionel David was staying not at the UN’s heavily sandbagged guesthouse, from where the convoy would depart, but half a mile away at the city’s main hotel. The BBC crew loaded their voluminous equipment, tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of generators, sat phones, Toko boxes and old-fashioned edit packs in silver suitcases, into the backs of two cars. But they were fatally slow in starting out. Over by the UN guesthouse a large and hostile crowd had gathered around the waiting convoy. When the mob started smashing car windows the organisers decided they could wait no longer, and set off for Hairaton. The first BBC car turned the corner and drove straight into a riot. The mob had stormed the empty UN guesthouse and was in the process of looting it. Now they turned on the equipment-laden BBC car.
Lionel and Mir arrived in the second car to see their cameraman and soundman sprinting down the street pursued by a swarm of Afghans shouting Kill the foreigners. By now it was open season on all outsiders. Everyone in Mazar understood that the Taliban were secretly armed and funded by the Pakistanis, just as the Pakistanis with their American and other Western allies had armed and funded the Mujaheddin opposition to the Soviets twenty years before. British, American, Pakistani, Taliban – what was the difference? They were all foreigners, and all guilty by association. It was their fault that jang, the fighting, had finally come to the once peaceful city of Mazar. The BBC men narrowly escaped in the second car and made it back to the hotel, where they discovered that someone had stabbed the car door, piercing the metal. Mir advised Lionel that there was nothing for it but to seek official protection. And so they all drove together to the traitor Abdul Malik’s house to see if they could find someone, anyone, in charge. They found General Majid Ruzi, one of Dostum’s senior commanders, who was full of purposeful sympathy for the foreigners.
– Leave it to me, he said. I’ll see what I can do.
Three weeks earlier I had interviewed Ruzi myself along with Ewan, Rick and Mir, in a field tent out on the western front. We sat cross-legged and drank tea in glorious sunshine on the edge of a plain tinkling with birdsong, the air filled with the scent of red and yellow spring flowers. His men were hunting partridge chicks among the brush, walking in long lines through the undergrowth with nets. He seemed an urbane and charming man. He was shrewd and educated and appeared pleased with the opportunity to discuss the war. The Northern Alliance, he told us, would never permit the Taliban to take Mazar. This was because the northern Afghans were liberal people with no time for fundamentalism. The Uzbeks believed in live and let live. Had we heard that in Kandahar the Taliban were insisting that stallions wore trousers? He roared with laughter. Were these people not preposterous?
But there was no live and let live from Ruzi now. Lionel recounted in the Observer what happened next, in what he described as an act of personal catharsis. Mir and the Westerners were escorted by Ruzi’s men back to the UN guesthouse. A quarter of an hour later Ruzi himself turned up. Then odd bits of their looted kit began to materialise. The foreigners’ metal suitcases were so conspicuous that it was easy for Ruzi’s men to retrieve them from the bazaars into which they had vanished. An open Russian jeep appeared with a sullen young man in the back, a TV camera marked BBC bouncing on the seat beside him. He was a Hazara commander, darker-skinned than the average Afghan, wearing Western-looking brown clothes. He had been arrested while carrying the camera – or so Ruzi said. Events began to accelerate. Ruzi barked orders. The milling crowd of looters, suddenly electrified, drew back. That was the moment that Mir realised his mistake in soliciting Ruzi’s help.
– Lionel, he said, he is going to kill this man.
Thinking quickly, Mir went down on his knees and touched Ruzi’s feet, the sincerest Afghan gesture of supplication and respect. Lionel followed suit and beseeched the General, Mir translating feverishly: a lump of glass and metal was not worth dying for. He would prefer the Hazara to keep the camera equipment than to pay for it with his life. But Ruzi’s decision was final. The Hazara was marched by two gunmen to a wall across the road, a look of disbelief on his face, protesting loudly over his shoulder that he was an Afghan like Ruzi, while the BBC man was just a foreigner; why was he doing this? Then the gunmen stepped back from their still protesting prisoner, flicked their Kalashnikovs to automatic, and killed him instantly in a spray of bullets. Before the noise of the gunfire had died away the crowd had fled in all directions, leaving behind a shoe or two, bits of loot from the guesthouse, a hastily abandoned bicycle.
It was time for the foreigners to leave, but even now they had to wait. Lionel, in deep shock from what had just happened, recalled playing an uncomfortably symbolic game of Risk in the trashed but re-secured guesthouse, while a friendly mechanic reinstalled the camshafts of two decommissioned UN Landcruisers parked around the back.
Two hours later the cars were ready and the foreigners reassembled, trying hard not to look at the pool of coagulated blood in the dust across the street. Mir offered to travel with them, but the convoy organisers thankfully dissuaded him: he would never be allowed to cross the border, and Hairaton would be desperately dangerous for him once the foreigners were safely out of reach in Uzbekistan. Even in his home town he knew it was only a matter of time before the relatives of the dead Hazara came looking for revenge. A big crowd had witnessed the execution, and Mazar’s grapevine was highly developed. All the town would quickly know of his involvement in the killing.
He didn’t wait around to wave goodbye. As the foreigners finally rolled northwards he already knew that this day marked a major turning point in his life, and in all probability in the lives of his family, too. He would have to abandon his home town. The alternative was to die in a vengeful hail of bullets just as the camera thief had done.
I barely slept the night of Mir’s touchdown in London, one year on. By the following morning I had almost convinced myself that I had been duped. His promise to call me on arrival had meant nothing after all: he was just another crafty Afghan who had taken the opportunity to exploit another gullible foreigner. But when at last he did call with the explanation that he had ‘forgot’, I was too relieved to be angry, as well as a little ashamed for thinking ill of him. The Heathrow immigration officers had been friendly and had done everything by the book. His processing had taken less than an hour, and when he emerged Hamid was waiting for him as arranged.
Two mornings later, a Saturday, I headed east by motorbike to the address Mir had given me, a house in Mafeking Avenue, London E6. According to my street directory this was the postcode for East Ham, in the borough of Newham. I had lived in west London all my life, and my knowledge of most districts east of the financial centre was uncertain, so my journey was punctuated by frequent stops for a look at the map. Mafeking Avenue is beyond the most easterly suburbs that even many Londoners have heard of. Almost everyone knows that West Ham has a football club. Some people know of Plaistow from the song by Ian Dury. But what is there to say about East Ham, or the communities of Plashet, Wallend or Manor Park? And these are still places with ‘proper’ London postcodes. Out beyond the eastern arc of the North Circular ringroad the capital straggles on for another five miles at least, through Barking and Dagenham, barely thinning through Hornchurch and Upminster to the limits of the street directory. The immensity of the city was sobering. I had not expected my involvement with Mir to be broadening my horizons again so soon – certainly not this horizon, the eastern edge of my own home town.
On the A13 approach road some wag had prefixed a ‘T’ to a road sign marked Urban Clearway, but I was still unprepared for what I found. By the time I arrived it felt as though I had travelled out of London altogether and come to another city; or another continent. The street that ran past Upton Park tube station resembled more closely than seemed possible a Pakistani street bazaar. At first sight the crowds milling along the pavements appeared almost